alt Hacker NewsArtificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens
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I've just started listening to the book "Brave new world" (no spoilers please!) and this is literally how the book begins (but with humans) - what could possibly go wrong!
Colossal Biosciences has other ongoing projects including reviving the "Red Wolf" using DNA from coyote/wolf hybrids and CRISPR. They also want to introduce a Wooly Mammoth/elephant hybrid.
The company was founded by George Church, and is able to embark upon these projects thanks to deep-pocketed investors and skirting/bypassing traditional approaches aligned with federal programs and the Endangered Species Act. The following MIT Technology Review article covers the wolf project in detail:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/1135222/red-wolv... (paywall)
The future is getting creepier by the day. You know this'll be used in food farming.
Is this a company and not a research lab doing this? What's the economic imperative for funding this?
How will they resurrect a dodo? Is the idea that they have some DNA somewhere?
Colossal Biosciences
goal of resurrecting extinct bird species
C'mon.
They want to do a Jurassic Park.
life finds a way
Am I the only one wondering if it's 26 chickens at once from a single artificial egg or they just succeeded 26 times with different eggs? Rationally it probably has to be the latter, but the title confuses me.
This article is so strange. It is written by the company, but written in a way that an outsider would write.
> Colossal has not released its hatch rate for the 26 chickens, which limits direct comparison to prior shell-free systems. The announcement was also made without an accompanying peer-reviewed paper or publicly released dataset, meaning independent scientists have not yet been able to evaluate the underlying methodology.
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For a sec there I thought the National Enquirer had gotten a new lease on life.
> says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who was not involved in the research. “We could better help millions of birds every year by solving the more immediate threats of disappearing habitats, collisions with building windows, and prowling outdoor cats,”
Yes. Even if they stuck it at the end, it shows good journalism to call this out.